South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

by Imani Perry

The point: I wish people wouldn’t truncate history into romance. I mean, really, do you think that house slaves lived in ease? Do you think a “kindly master” was anything but an oxymoron? Witness the dance.

The American way is what has been bequeathed to us all in unequal measure. The United States is, formally speaking, the child of Great Britain. And we teachers, historians, and patriots all have inherited a British inclination to tell history in a linear forward sequence. But that just won’t work for the story of the South. Or the nation.

They think they know the South’s moves. They believe the region is out of step, off rhythm, lagging behind, stumbling. It is a convenient misunderstanding. This country was made with the shame of slavery, poverty, and White supremacy blazoned across it as a badge of dishonor. To sustain a heroic self-concept, it has inevitably been deemed necessary to distance “America” from the embarrassment over this truth. And so the South, the seat of race in the United States, was turned on, out, and into this country’s gully.

Race is at the heart of the South, and at the heart of the nation. Like the conquest of Indigenous people, the creation of racial slavery in the colonies was a gateway to habits and dispositions that ultimately became the commonplace ways of doing things in this country.

From the beginning, this nation was experimental and innovative as well as invasive. Resourceful even. But any virtues were distorted by a greater driver: unapologetic greed, which legitimized violent conquest and captivity. This is the American habitus. We are in awe at the sublime natural landscape and then use up its abundance into oblivion. We are primed to be destroyers with a disregard for the moral, human, and environmental costs of it all. We are a nation that stratifies, often putting the people who build and sustain it at the bottom. Among us, there are citizens, second-class citizens, noncitizens, and those who are cast so far beneath every other category that it is as though they are seen as nonpersons.

And yet “racism,” despite all evidence of its ubiquity, is still commonly described as “belonging” to the South. I don’t just mean that other regions ignore their racism and poverty and project them onto the South, although that is certainly true. I also mean that the cruelest labor of sustaining the racial-class order was historically placed upon the South. Its legacy of racism then is of course bloodier than most. But other regions are also bloody in deed. Discrimination is everywhere, but collectively the country has leeched off the racialized exploitation of the South while also denying it.

Remember, the Deep South was made at a crossroads between the lust for cotton and the theft of Indigenous land. It was a tandem movement. The aftermath is a ghostlike presence: place-names, landmarks, and only tiny communities where numerous nations once belonged.

Even though anthropologists claimed Whiteness was a bigger category than European, their professional judgment didn’t carry much weight. The truth is race is a fiction, and Blackness is at the heart of the making of the South. But it is no privilege. That gift belongs to Whiteness and whoever it chose and chooses to embrace. Whiteness is not only domineering. It has also been fickle.

The consequence of the projection of national sins, and specifically racism, onto one region is a mis-narration of history and American identity. The consequence of truncating the South and relegating it to a backwards corner is a misapprehension of its power in American history.

My son Issa has warned me about the danger of making things look too beautiful. To be beautiful, it must be truthful. And the truth is often ugly. But it’s funny, too. And strange. Also morbid.

In 1906, after the promises of Reconstruction had been denied, and Jim Crow had settled across the South, members of the Niagara movement gathered at Storer College. This was the second meeting of the racial justice organization. Its leaders, W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter, were influential Black intellectuals. But everyone there was in some way distinguished.

Though Azikiwe is mentioned in the Storer College exhibit, there isn’t much discussion of his time or reflections about what it meant for a man who became so great out there to have been a Black boy here. Maybe I am projecting too much onto the place, keeping myself from seeing it fully. Maybe there is nothing unusual about a leader of African independence studying math, running a pawnshop, and being a coal miner in Appalachia. After all, Martin Delany, one of the fathers of Black nationalism, was himself from West Virginia. He said, “It is only in the mountains that I can fully appreciate my existence as a man in America, and my own native land.” “Native land” had by then, even for those who eventually returned to Liberia like Delany, a remote and aspirational quality. But he knew the mountains.

I think maybe reenactment should be described as a performance art, even if I am still uneasy about the pleasure it provides.

Confederates didn’t take Black soldiers prisoner. They killed every one of them they could.

Edgar Allan Poe agreed, in part: There should be no hesitation about “Appalachia.” In the first place, it is distinctive. “America” is not [a distinctive name] . . . South America is “America,” and will insist upon remaining so. Poe thought claiming the Indigenous name “Appalachia” might be some recompense for Indigenous people who had been “unmercifully despoiled, assassinated and dishonored.”

The myth of surface gentlemanliness was a sly fiction then; it is certainly understood as a loud fiction now. But still, we don’t hold it up to the light nearly enough. Gentlemen were not gentlemen at all.

The challenges faced by miners are local. But the resistance of miners can be mapped all over the globe. Nnamdi Azikiwe was a miner in West Virginia, and as an activist in Nigeria, he stood with miners against colonial authorities. One of the most important global throughlines of the twentieth century is that of exploited workers demanding their due.

The consequence has been that the moments of class solidarity across the lines of race were fleeting in US history. And now, when politicians use “working class” to mean White people rather than the whole working class, they extend a terrible distortion. But still, what should be matters as much as what is. History orients us and magnifies our present circumstance.

Mountain Dew soda, the most excessively sweet drink you can think of, is called that after moonshine, mastered in mountain country. Their first bottles had a picture of a hillbilly on them.

In traditional Chinese medicine, Asian ginseng cools, but North American ginseng warms the body. A fresh pound can go for $200, and dried it can go up to $800 and higher. This has given rise to legislatures creating newly defined crimes. Keep in mind “crimes” are created. Governments declare actions criminal all the time that don’t have to be, like making moonshine or “ginseng larceny.” Lest you think this is quaint, please note that ginseng is a billion-dollar industry. The wild growth in the mountains is so fine, not like the mass-produced pesticide-sprayed variety that comes by the regular means.

My grandmother, who we called “Mudear” or “Mudeah,” a Southern contraction of “Mother dear,” used to repeat the words she learned from her auntie: “You weren’t born to live on flowerbeds of ease.”

The Black-White binary of race has never been as permanent or fixed as people like to claim, not when you live up real close. Of course shared ways grew. Take, for example, a few women who sat in different places along the color line, from deep in the Mountain South. Doris Payne, a native of Slab Fork, West Virginia, is a striking and elegant elderly Black woman known as an international jewel thief. As her lore goes, she was a child in a jewelry store, giddy because her father had told her she could purchase a watch as a gift. But then the store owner, seeing White patrons enter, ushered her out rapidly. She left, but not before she had slipped a watch in her pocket. After she was dismissed by the proprietor, the comeuppance was sweet. It would be the driving force in her life. Her skill grew. She remade herself into a lady who lunched, poised and elegant, with the veneer of wealth that she had in theatricality, if not in the bank. Diamond Doris has perfected polish, and she had a heap of social security numbers and names to go with her genteel resistance. With the gestures of a wealthy doyenne, she can slip diamond rings, from one carat to ten, on her long, elegant nutmeg fingers. She is a glorious outlaw; her memoir and a documentary about her life are celebratory rather than ambivalent. We want her to get away with it, to escape the yoke of crime and punishment. Maybe we live vicariously through her, feeding both our fantasy of being Cinderella-ed into a life without c...

To remake ourselves from our imaginations is a classically American endeavor, and we are charmed by its many forms, whether the work of thieves, entertainers, or presidents.

As with many of the civil rights movement organizers you know of, Rosa Parks attended a workshop at Highlander before the bus boycott. She was already an organizer as an active member of the NAACP. Same as Martin Luther King Jr., who first visited in 1957. Highlander did not create organizers, but rather facilitated organizing.

In 1961, the state of Tennessee revoked Highlander’s license and seized its property. This wasn’t surprising. Berea College, also in the mountains of Kentucky, had been founded as a coeducational integrated college in 1855 and was forced to become White only from 1904 until 1950, by which time its progressive Christian politics were less incendiary, though much of the South remained segregated. Highlander pushed even further against the grain than Berea, and they were punished for it. However, they regrouped and reopened in Knoxville.

A multiracial institution that is networked nationally and internationally and invested in the lives of working people who are the backbone of the world, Highlander belies the mythology of Appalachia. But it also fits directly in the history of organized labor and a history of imagining, in particular imagining a different way of being in the world, together.

The song of the Mountain South is that which rings out into open air. It, too, is a way of asserting oneself, as not a cog in the system but a presence. The vibrato, the Southern yodel, cracked grief in wet bluegrass, is a sermon that repeats itself.

Acting like you know everything and acting like you don’t know how to be respectful will keep you ignorant. Be humble.

Patrick Henry shouted “Give me liberty or give me death” from the podium at the Second Virginia Convention in 1775, a call for independence. As a young man, Henry was moved by the First Great Awakening and became a supporter of religious liberty and an orator who understood the value of emotional as well as intellectual impact. A fiddler, a lawyer, and eventually a politician, Henry believed that both slavery and the fact that the Anglican church remained the official church of Virginia were injurious to the development of the colony. He was also a slaveholder. This is what I think of when people say we must have practical politics. Murderous hypocrisy is an old American habit.

If you want to understand a nation, or have aspirations for it that are decent, myth ought to be resisted. If we tell the story of the nation as it began, in Virginia, with the founding fathers and the bulk of early presidents and the first permanent British settlement, the terms of our nation are clear. Conquest, violence towards the Indigenous, a drive to mastery and master-class abundance reaped from other’s labor—those were the terms.

Whatever theological or philosophical questioning they had about owning humans, it was undoubtedly secondary to the drive for power and wealth.

The truth is, values are never necessities. They are priorities, choices, modes of self-creation. Whatever the intentions, this is the world the founders made.

Banneker did what we, Black people, are often told we must not do when confronting history. He responded directly to the ugliness of a founding father. Banneker, a man of his time, refused the “Jefferson was a man of his time” argument and challenged Jefferson’s bigotry.

Long fingers, squinted eyes, curling smoke. A habit that once upon a time brought prosperity to the colonies and subjugation to our ancestors. History is a funhouse mirror.

The landscape (and here I don’t mean Charlottesville but the United States) is still frightening because one doesn’t know what is lurking beneath the professions of equality. I think that’s the part that people who defend sites of violence against their tragedies (as in “See, we really aren’t like that!”) remain deliberately ignorant about. It is a cruel and willful ignorance. They just act like they don’t know.

KENTUCKY’S EAST IS APPALACHIA. To the west is bluegrass country. Louisville, at the edge, reaches to the tip of what we call the Midwest. It’s one of those places, like St. Louis, that reminds you that cultural borders are more porous than maps.

Black people escaping slavery flooded into the city. Locally enslaved people freed themselves as well. Slaveholders panicked and grew embittered that their human wealth had taken possession of themselves. This is the source of the quip “Kentucky did not join the Confederacy until after the Civil War.”

I’d first heard of the Derby’s famous Southern drink, the mint julep, when I read The Great Gatsby in seventh grade. And it remained polite in my head forever after. By then, the drink was neatly uprooted from Black bartenders who concocted that and other drinks under the yoke of slavery. Skill with spirits got them free, or at least loosened the chains enough to make a difference.

There’s a lot of delight in the pomp of the American South, and if you can take the ugliness out of the equation, not just historically but conceptually, there’s a lot of fun to be had. Americans are quite good at taking up pleasures of history and leaving its victims to fend for themselves. From Gone with the Wind to now, we have so many examples. Sure, today that old film has the specter of shame, with Mammy and all that. But we still have a taste for the facade. Maybe because once you agree to go down the rabbit hole, everything gets messy.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a Deep Southerner who would EVER call Maryland or Washington, DC, the South. Even the storied history of enslaved people from Maryland doesn’t keep it from seeming Northern.

I still am reticent to call the mid-Atlantic South the South. And yet I have learned in the course of my travels that there are “Souths,” plural as much as singular, despite my Deep South bias. I know that while the South is a determined thing, it is also a shifting and varied one. Re-declared many times as a fact, it echoes far beyond its moving borders.

As historians of slavery have noted, our images of auction blocks are more theatrical than the reality often was. Regular places were sites of the trade in people. The everydayness of disaster was a feature of slave society. We might be inclined to look for somewhere to place a memorial or an altar to the past, that we can treat as particularly hallowed ground. But the truth is that this mundane place where I was served cranberry juice and fish by a young White man with flopping brown hair and an eager smile is exactly where my foreparents might have been wrenched away from everything they loved. Matter-of-fact, like that.

It has often been noted that slaves were denied knowledge as a way to keep them docile. But some, like the builders, the blacksmiths, the plantation botanists, and the cooks, were required to hold vast knowledge and steady it in their minds and memory because pen and paper were denied.

Was home some affect in the ether, hard to hold, or a future perfect tension, imagined as part of some freedom to come? This word that I hold in my mouth, ever and always meaning the state where I was born, “home” is not something I am sure can be assumed to have had meaning before freedom. Familiarity, reliability, even love—these are not the same as home. Nor is home the building where one sleeps, necessarily. Prisoners, interned people, the involuntarily committed and institutionalized are not at home, are they?

When Maryland was still a young colony, King Charles I of England was loath to invest in this vice, as he found smoking vulgar and filthy. But the nicotine business became too valuable a prospect to do anything but invest in. A begrudging greed took hold.

There are still people, including children, working in Southern tobacco fields. The past isn’t even past, as Faulkner put it. Recently, public health researchers have called attention to the poison seeping into the bodies of the children in tobacco fields, who are now mostly Mexican and Central American. Children have never stopped being in American fields, nor have they ever stopped being held captive on American soil. How often are we attentive to the fact that there are still child captives? In a conversation with a friend, I remember talking about the child-removal policy of the Trump administration. And he responded that it was harrowing indeed, but how new was it really? Yes, he was right. Democratic presidents have had the same practices, only less cruelly enacted. But also, we remove children from their homes and incarcerate them all over the nation and have for years, whether immigrant or juvenile detention. That, too, is an inheritance of slavery and colonialism. The difference is one of degree but not kind. That blind eye, we turn it until we don’t. But we turn it every day.

I also eventually ordered the book I avoided in Annapolis. The Practice of Klannishness offers a tidy lesson. We think of the Klan as the violent thugs of history, because they were. But the familiarity of their ethos should shake us to awareness. Their practice was described as generous, family-oriented, and respectable. The Klan is so very American. We are used to making virtue out of shameful ways. And justifying brutality for the sake of virtue. It is easy to see the deception with the Klan, but imagine all the other ways those habits are made manifest in our culture.

Everywhere one turns in DC, one witnesses the history of the South:

However, the Confederacy is not celebrated on the National Mall. One of the sharpest signs of the tensions in federalism is how often Confederate monuments were placed at Southern courts and statehouses in contrast to Washington, DC. Being the nation’s capital muted its Southernness at least in that regard.

I myself have made the distinction between the sins of the founding fathers and the Confederacy by saying the “lost cause” is worse because they celebrate traitors to the nation. But that is, in a sense, a victor’s skewed logic and not compelling even to me. The Revolutionary War soldiers were traitors to the Crown. We celebrate it otherwise only because they won and we became what followed.